Ibn al-Arabi

Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-Arabi was born in Murcia in Muslim Spain in 1165 and educated in Seville. He left al-Andalus for the East in 1200, travelled through North Africa, Mecca, Anatolia and Syria, and settled in Damascus, where he died in 1240. He wrote some hundreds of works and is among the most influential thinkers of Sufism, best known for his prose Meccan Revelations (al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya).

The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq (“Interpreter of Desires”), completed in Mecca in 1215, is a sequence of short love lyrics in the manner of the classical Arabic ode. Ibn al-Arabi later wrote a commentary on it himself, explaining the beloved and the desert imagery as mystical. The poems here follow Reynold A. Nicholson’s English version of 1911, with the verses printed as numbered lines in the translation; the commentary is not reproduced.